January 05, 2012

January 2012

We started the book club meeting much the same way many of us start the new year: by looking at our diet and promising to eat better. From there we wound our way to e-readers, dead poets and cranky chefs. The biggest meeting to date, we covered a lot:

You Might as Well Live, The Life and Times of Dorothy Parker – John Keats

Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle movie

Explosive Eighteen – Janet Evanovich

Katherine Heigl to play Stephanie Plum in “One for the Money”

Little Gale Gumbo – Erika Marks

Empire Falls – Richard Russo

Straight Man – Richard Russo

Pulitzer: A Life in Politics, Print and Power – James McGrath Morris

The Fiddler in the Subway – Gene Weingarten

Pier 21 – Linda Granfield

No Higher Honor – Condoleezza Rice

Jesus of Nazareth – Pope Benedict XVI

The Litigators – John Grisham

We’ll Always Have Cleveland – Les Roberts

Kitchen Confidential – Anthony Bourdain

Service Included – Phoebe Damrosch

From our sister group in Oklahoma:

Lawton Book Bunch

December 8, 2011 meeting

Books

Skipping Christmas by John Grisham

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers

East of Eden by John Steinbeck

Heretic’s Daughter by Kathleen Kent

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie

Runaway: Stories by Alice Monro

Crossing the Creek: The Literary Friendship of Zora Neale Hurston and Marjorie

Kinnan Rawlings by Anna Lillios

A Heartbeat Away by Michael Palmer

Whiplash by Catherine Coulter

Wallender (Swedish detective series) by Henning Mankell

Ladies’ Paradise by Emile Zola

Marshall Field’s: The Store that Helped Build Chicago by Gayle Soucek

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

1491 by Charles C. Mann

Scherrey’s memoir research: Further discussion of Scherrey’s memoir of growing up in assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, and his resignation from the priesthood and marriage.

Movies

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Smoke Signals

The Gods Must Be Crazy

Discussions:

1.) Censorship of school and library books. Case in point: Eisenhower High School’s refusal to allow the junior English class to read East of Eden.

2.) Hollywood remakes of foreign films (We will all have to go to see the movie of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and have further discussion.

January 12, 2012 meeting

Big Read Discussion

Participation and cooperation between community and schools. If you have a favorite – let Dory Thomas at the Lawton Public Library (581-3450 x3) know. The committee will meet, Wednesday afternoon, January 18, 2012.

The Big Read Book Selection

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain

The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya

The Bridge of San Luis Rey and Our Town by Thornton Wilder

The Call of the Wild by Jack London

The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (We did in 2007)

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers

Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson

In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez

The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan

A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest J. Gaines

Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich

The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett

My Antonia by Willa Cather

Old School by Tobias Wolff

The Poetry of Emily Dickinson

The Poetry of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The Poetry of Robinson Jeffers

The Shawl by Cynthia Ozick

The Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe

Sun, Stone, and Shadows edited by Jorge F. Hernandez

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

The Thief and the Dogs by Naguib Mahfouz

The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (We did in 2010)

Washington Square by Henry James Books

A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin

Books

Girl with …… all 3 titles by Stieg Larsson

Wallander (series) by Henning Mankell

Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

Twilight (series) by Stephanie Meyers (negative comments)

Picture of DorianGray by Oscar Wilde

Dracula by Bram Stoker

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

The Tiger’s Wife by Tea Obreht

Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee (2011 Pulitzer for Non-Fiction)

Unpacking My Library: Architects and Their Books edited by Jo Steffens featuring an essay by Walter Benjamin: “Unpacking My Library: A Talk about Book Collecting”

Dick Van Dyke: My Lucky Life In and Out of Show Business by Dick Van Dyke

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie

The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls

The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. Du Bois

Movies

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Insomnia

The Strange Case if Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde with Jack Palance, 1968. Made for TV. DVD on Amazon, but not available at Netflicks. Youtube has segments.

Discussions:

Hollywood remakes of foreign films. Those who saw the American version of the movie of “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” liked it and thought it possibly was even more true to the novel than the Swedish version. They also liked Rooney Mara’s and Daniel Craig’s portrayals.

From Mary Lou in Maryland:

David Baldacci, Simple Genius (2007). Ex-Secret Service agent Sean King and his ex-cop partner Michelle Maxwell once again pit their wits against the nefarious world of the Washington, DC spy industry, both governmental and free-lance. The setting is along the York River in Virginia and includes a secret CIA training camp, a former Navy Base, and the mysterious Babbage Town where the resident scientists are engaged in some very secret research. Murders and mayhem ensue.

Leon Uris, QB VII (1970). The title refers to Queen’s Bench Courtroom Number Seven, located in London. Two prominent barristers are trying a libel case involving a prominent American novelist and a knighted doctor. At issue is the author’s passing reference to the doctor’s role in Nazi concentration camps in Poland. The story is shocking and unpleasant right up to the end.

Brian Jan Corrigan, The Poet of Loch Ness (2005). Marine biologist and professor Perry Miggs and his wife Perdita leave their Michigan college town to spend a summer in a small town on Loch Ness. Perry hires a boat captain and guide who happens to be Perdita’s lover from her college days at St Andrews. He is now a poet and a recluse and a very colorful character. Equally intriguing are the sisters who run the B&B where the Miggs are staying. This is a fine tale of love triangles, local myths, and a very elusive sea monster.

Christopher Moore, Lamb, A Novel: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal (2002). Biff and Joshua (Jesus is the Greek translation) meet at the town well in Nazareth when they are six years old. Soon thereafter they meet the very intriguing Maggie Magdalene. They have the propensity for mischief and misadventures of normal children but then there are Joshua’s abnormal powers. Biff is a politically savvy and amusing character who is always trying to keep his brilliant but naïve friend out of trouble with the authorities. Eventually Biff’s mission is doomed to failure, as we know, but there are many adventures along the way as Joshua seeks out the wisemen from the East and studies their various religious teachings. If you remember your history of philosophy and religion courses, you will be highly amused. Moore certainly did his research and his wit is highly creative and delightful. As Biff says at the beginning, “You think you know how this story is going to end, but you don’t. Trust me, I was there. I know.”

Lorna Landvik, Oh My Stars (2005). Violet Mathers is raised by an abusive father in rural Kentucky in the Depression. She finds work in the local thread factory, but suffers an injury. She sets off for San Francisco on a bus but ends up stranded in North Dakota where she is taken in by a local family with a strikingly handsome son, Kjel. Although Violet believes herself to be worthless, she finds herself embarked on a musical career with Kjel and two Black musicians from Memphis. We are convinced of Violet’s innate worthiness from the beginning and gradually the other characters come to share our perspective. The novel has the strong and compelling characters we expect from Landvik and it provides a fascinating depiction of the life of traveling musicians in the Great Depression.

Santa Montefiore, The Gypsy Madonna (2006). Like Montefiore’s other novels, this is a mystery and a love story with a fine sense of history. One mystery concerns the sudden appearance of an unknown painting by Titian, another concerns how a young boy lost his voice, and a third concerns guitar-playing, cowboy-hatted Coyote Magellan. The love story revolves around the boy’s mother. The history concerns events of World War II in a small town in Bordeaux. The story shifts narrators and timeframes, from the 6-year-old boy in France in the late 1940s to the grown may in New York in the 1980s. The suspense holds all the way to the end of the novel.

Alafair Burke, Judgment CALLS (2003). James Lee Burke’s daughter has become a novelist. Her perspective is not quite a dark as her father’s and her writing is not as poetic, but this novel is a very respectable effort in the crime-solving vein. Samantha Kincaid is a deputy district attorney in Portland, Oregon. She is prosecuting her first major crimes case, a vicious rape and attempted murder of a 13-yer old runaway. Nothing is as it seems. The surprises just keep coming. This is a gritty, fast-paced novel.

Lorna Landvik, The View from Mount Joy (2007). The narrator and central character in this novel is a teenage hockey player, Joe Andreson. His widowed mother moves to Minneapolis to live with her sister for Joe’s senior year in high school. Joe’s mother and aunt are the strong female characters we expect from Landvik, as are several of his female classmates. To help the family finances, Joe finds a part-time job at Haughland Foods, a unique local grocery and the store becomes another major influence in Joe’s life as he moves through adulthood. The male narrator hinders Landvik not at all.

Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club (1989). I have started this novel several times over the years and finally gave it enough attention to finish it. It tells the stories of four mothers, who grew up in much hardship in China before emigrating to California, and their four daughters, born and raised in San Francisco. The narrator shifts about among these eight characters as the daughters gradually learn about their mothers’ lives. The novel requires concentration but I’m glad I finally read it through.

Alexander McCall Smith, 44 Scotland Street (2005), Espresso Tales (2005), The World According to Bertie (2007). These are volumes 1, 2 and 4 of a serial novel that Smith created in daily increments for the newspaper The Scotsman. The serial focuses on the lives of the residents of the flats at 44 Scotland Street, Edinburgh. These are the 20-something spectacularly narcissistic Bruce, his new flatmate Pat, the flamboyant older woman, Domenica, inhabiting the flat across the hall, and the unwilling young musician and linguistic prodigy Bertie who lives downstairs with his quintessentially domineering mother and nonassertive father. An art gallery, its ineffectual young owner, and familiar parts of central Edinburgh also appear in the chronicle. The series enjoys the gentle, wry humor and satirically overdrawn characters we admire in Smith’s fiction.

Michael Connelly, Angels Flight (1999), The Narrows (2004), The Closers (2005), The Overlook (2006, 2007, 2008). What fan of the mystery genre could resist a seasoned senior police detective named Hieronymus Bosch? His young partners call him Harry and are sometimes uncomfortable with his disregard (and occasional contempt) for the bureaucratic politics of LAPD. The plots are intricate and engaging and Harry’s tenacity on the trail of villainy is scarily admirable.

Thank you for a truly wonderful evening, and see you next time February 1!

1 comment:

I just wanted to point out that the bibliographic information given by the members of the book club is often quite vague. Laura must do an awful lot of research in order to compile an accurate list. We appreciate it.